How To Attract Your Goals

What if instead of going out and chasing down our goals every day we could cause them to come to us? What if there was something we could do to somehow cause our biggest goals to find us irresistible? Too good to be true? Maybe not.

Way back before my wife Cameron and I were dating she bought a grey Honda Accord. As a Toyota owner myself I didn’t know or care much about Hondas, but I did know that I wanted to hang out with Cameron!

Around the same time there was a special at the Honda dealerships in Austin and hundreds of other people bought the same gray Honda Accord. Suddenly I was seeing Cameron’s Accord everywhere I went. Accords followed me to work, they ate lunch at my favorite restaurants, they trained at my gym. They were everywhere!

I later learned that there was not, in fact, a Honda event that caused hundreds of people to buy the exact same car as the girl I wanted to date. It was just my human brain that had tuned itself to the Cameron network.

Ignorance is Not Bliss

Every day we are bombarded with millions and millions of pieces of information. Everything we see, hear, and touch send tiny bits of information to our brains to decode. To cope with it all our brains automatically tune out over 99% of it and only focus on the things that matter to us.

Did hundreds of people in Austin suddenly buy the same car as Cameron? Not a chance! The cars were always all around me, but I never noticed. They may as well have been invisible to me.

Put Your Mind To Work

In the same way my brain directed my attention towards gray Accords it also points the way to my other goals. When I clearly write down my goals and read them daily I am effectively installing a filter for my brain. It tunes me into the ideas and information I need to achieve my goals. All I have to do is pay attention!

I’m attracting success.

One of our goals around the house right now is to organize our closets and storage. You’d be surprised the places we find inspiration when we’re not even looking. Store shelves catch our eye for organization and magazines are suddenly filled with new ideas.

As “luck” would have it we got a great deal on some shelving this weekend at The Container Store shelving sale. We probably see dozens of ads for sales every day and completely ignore them, but this one caught our eye. Coincidence? I think not!

Another goal for this year was to rework our retirement portfolio. I “stumbled across” a couple great books early last spring teaching exactly what I needed to learn. I wasn’t looking for books at the time, but my mind was tuned into this need. I bought them, read them, and reached my goal.

Test Me On This

Top people have very clear goals. They know what they want and they write it down. Unsuccessful people carry their goals around in their head like marbles rattling around in a can.

So test me on this: Write down one of your goals – make it clear. Put it someplace so you’ll see it daily, and see what your brain finds for you.

There are solutions, ideas, and insights all around you I guarantee it. You’ll meet interesting people who’ve done what you want to do (or done what you don’t want to do).

Notice these things. Pay attention to them. Engage interesting people to pick their brains about how they made it or what went wrong. Notice the features of things that catch your eye and ask how you can apply them to your life.

Now instead of chasing that goal you’re attracting it – and that’s a whole lot more fun and a lot less work!